This chapter explores the interaction between discourse structure, grammar, and prosody, on the example of insubordination, that is, the main clause use of formally subordinate clauses. After an overview of the forms and meanings of insubordinate constructions cross-linguistically, it focuses on a particular illustration of this phenomenon: contrastive insubordinate conditionals (CICC) in Spanish. First, it argues for the constructional status of the pattern and then it explores its discursive and prosodic features. The results of a corpus study show that CICC can occur in five different contexts, with a high preference for dispreferred responses. This is taken as evidence for proposing a network representation, with a schema representing the common form and meaning features of the construction and several instantiations in prototypical and peripheral contexts. Prosodically, the construction is combined with restricted prosodic patterns expressing similar pragmatic functions (focus and contrast). We can thus model prosodic patterns as pairings of a prosodic form and a pragmatic meaning and are inherited by sentence-level constructions expressing compatible pragmatic meanings.

After a long tradition of studying languages as isolated systems, researchers are increasingly aware of the fact that speakers of most of the world’s languages are multilingual. The coexistence of multiple languages within the brain can be a significant force shaping each. The recognition of constructions and their arrays of constructional properties provides a useful tool for understanding contact phenomena: much of what is transferred in contact situations are constructions or constructional features. Conversely, examination of what is replicated can enhance our understanding of the nature of linguistic knowledge. Here replicated constructions of varying sizes and degrees of schematicity are first described, from words through discourse structures, then the transfer of individual constructional features, including prosody, special connotations, various pragmatic effects, linguistic and extralinguistic contexts of use, and frequency are discussed, as well as the social situations under which they occur. The kinds of constructions and constructional properties replicated provide additional evidence that constructions are more than simple combinations of basic form and meaning.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, like many of his contemporaries, was drawn as a young man to the lively visual arts scene in London in the 1860s and 1870s. From a family of professional and amateur sketchers and illustrators, he initially considered a career as an artist. What, then, did Hopkins see? What pictures did he look at, and what did he sketch? How did the careful cultivation of his eye, under the formative influence of John Ruskin, shape his later life as a Jesuit poet? How do we get from a visual culture that Hopkins shared with many others of his time and place to the powerful originality of his mature poems? Analyzing evidence from Hopkins’s surviving sketches, letters, and journals, this chapter explores the effects of Hopkins’s visual education on the language, the prosody, and the shaping force of grace in the poems.

Hopkins’s journals are usually read as source-books for his poems. Their fragmentariness smacks of the archive, seeming to position this material as purely of scholarly interest. These odds and ends are meant, it would seem, to be searched for aperçus, inscapes, what Whitman would call ‘go-befores and embryons’, later immortalized in verse. But it’s also possible to read the journals as literature in their own right: as a great poet’s utmost experiment with the possibilities of prose. Hopkins’s nature descriptions experiment relentlessly with the poetics of prose his letters assert piecemeal. He inherited an aesthetic of notation that, arising from the diaries of Romantic poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was made irreversibly self-conscious within the published prose of his Victorian precursor, John Ruskin. Revealing an apparently spontaneous, self-shaping spirit alive in plants, stones, clouds, and water, Hopkins’s self-conscious sentences illuminate – as well as transcend – Victorian habits of intellectual enquiry.

This chapter argues that we must understand Hopkins’s engagement with rhythm amid the cultural contexts of poetic experimentation and metrical and linguistic inquiry during the nineteenth century, a prosodic discourse in which Hopkins was a participant. Amid linguistic and religious definitions of tradition and rupture, Hopkins thought through several changing definitions of rhythm in language, in poetry and in the world. Our focus on sprung rhythm, though his most well-known innovation, clouds other theories of rhythms and important cultural histories of accent, speech, national identity, and religious identification that show the ways that accent and stress are part of a broader pattern – a broader rhythm he wants to detect – of likeness and difference in all things.

This chapter describes ways to approach the phonetic analysis of talk-in-interaction. It starts off with a brief overview of some of the general issues. These include how we go about observing and transcribing. These are practices common to Conversation Analysis and phonetics, and the discussion aims to bridge different disciplinary norms. The chapter also presents a phonetically informed approach to analysing speech in data sessions. The main part of the chapter works through a short fragment of data line by line, showing how conversational data can be approached from a phonetic perspective while adopting a CA approach to analysis, and connecting the reader to wider concerns that have been addressed in the literature. The topics covered include sequential organisation, including turn beginnings and ends; speech timing across turns, including an illustration of rhythmicity; discussion of intonation and its functions in conversation; the relationship between phonetic design and social action; ways of building a collection of examples for analysis.

The aim of this chapter is to provide the state-of-the-art of the research on the development of suprasegmental phonology in bilingual children from infancy through childhood. First, we discuss word-level prosodic phenomena, with a special focus on the bilingual acquisition of word stress and syllable structure, which has been a lively area of research. We also present recent data on the acquisition of tone, which remains a less investigated topic. Second, we consider the acquisition of phrase-level prosody, namely, rhythm and intonation. For each domain of prosodic development, we briefly review monolingual patterns and discuss how learning two (or more) phonological systems can affect developmental trajectories, showing that there can be different cross-linguistic interactions such as transfer, delay, acceleration, or fusion. We also consider potential influencing factors that can trigger different tracks in the development of prosody, for example age of onset, amount of exposure, language dominance, and simultaneous or sequential language acquisition. The chapter concludes with a discussion of avenues for future research.

Over the last ten years, research on groups of infants and toddlers acquiring more than one language from birth has grown rapidly, though it still trails the research on infants learning just one language. This chapter discusses behavioural and neurophysiological findings about how bilinguals perceive spoken language in the first three years of life. This research demonstrates that bilingual and monolingual infants use similar core mechanisms to learn from differing linguistic input. Crucially, comparing their acquisition trajectories allows us to make inferences about the early linguistic representations of bilingual infants.

This chapter reviews the last twenty-five years of L2 prosody research in three sections, word stress, sentence intonation, and rhythm, and presents findings in relation to two underlying themes, form-meaning mapping and additive versus subtractive bilingual contexts. Concerning L2 stress, pioneering research framed perception difficulties either as an L1-to-L2 cue-transfer problem or as a processing deficit linked to learners’ inability to represent contrastive stress in their lexicons. Recent research established the extent and limits of those initial frames. L2 sentence intonation has multiple factors modeling its variation. One of them, social meaning, and in particular accommodation literature revealed the effect of affective factors which in multilingual communities became stronger than that of linguistic and social factors. As regards L2 rhythm, most research uses duration-based measures. Indeed, recent L1 studies started examining pitch-based rhythm measures which are still to be explored in L2. Ending with suggestions for future research that address those biases, this chapter aims at promoting a more inclusive and comprehensive understanding of L2 prosody.

This chapter describes Clare’s attitude to form and surveys the various forms in which he writes. It emphasizes the variety of Clare’s formal achievement, showing how across his career he adopts different prosodic and generic conventions, including those of the sonnet, ballad, lyric, couplet, and ode. Running through all Clare’s poems, the chapter suggests, is a wariness of imposing excessive order upon the patterns of experience. The irregular beauty and emotional clarity of Clare’s poems emerge out of an effort to find a balance sympathetic to nature over artifice, spontaneity over control, and existing tradition over individual embellishment.

The author first defines the following notions of information structure: focus (vs. background), given (vs. new), and topic (vs. comment). He then goes on to show how these notions are reflected in the prosodic systems of Slavic languages. Focus in all Slavic languages is reflected in prosodic prominence governed by a stress-focus correspondence defined by the author. In general, ‘given’ is realized outside the sentence stress. Focus does not have an obligatory prosodic reflex in Slavic languages.

Slavic languages are notorious for rich inflectional systems, allowing substantial freedom in word order. Aside from SVO word order, canonical for the great majority of Slavic languages, orders with arguments surfacing in non-canonical positions are also allowed. We consider two such orders – OVS and OSV. The two orders stem from two different types of argument reordering with distinct syntactic, interpretive and prosodic properties. The first is linked to neutral prosody and is licenced by the object being construed as interpretively prominent compared to the subject. The object undergoing this type of reordering binds into the subject and takes scope over it. This reordering is possible only if the thematic prominence relations of arguments are identified by means other than their relative structural position. The second type is linked to marked prosody and is licenced by the displaced object being disambiguated as contrastive. In this type of reordering the object cannot bind into the subject or take scope over it. This type of reordering is possible only if the object carries a strong prosodic marker.

The chapter presents and discusses empirical data on the neuropsychology of gesture production. The focus of this chapter is on the specific contributions of the right and left hemispheres to the generation of gestures. Since the respective neuroscientific method has a substantial impact on the study results and different methodologies can even entail apparently opposing results concerning gesture production, different neuropsychological methods, their paradigms, and limitations are presented in detail. Spontaneous gesture production studies evidence a substantial contribution of the right hemisphere to gesture production, while gesture production on command studies show a relevant role of the left hemisphere. Gestures that are generated in association with right hemispheric functions such as spatial cognition, nonverbal emotional expression, global and metaphorical thinking appear to be generated in the right hemisphere, while gestures that are linked to tool use praxis are generated in the left hemisphere. The findings further provide a neuropsychological basis for understanding the complementarity but also the dissociation between gestural and verbal message.